Since the late 1980s East Bay based visual artist Djinn ne Carl Lewis has had work in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum, Anacostia Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Fine Art Houston, and New York City Public Library’s Schomburg Collection, this month was his first participation in a major exhibition, ‘Reflections in Black: A Reframing’ at NYU’s Cooper Square Gallery.
Executed around 1988 the image in the exhibition is a ‘Jinnagraph’, a process-driven and image manipulated dye-destruction print using a technique he created similar to Man Ray’s iconic Sabbatier Effect. Referenced in Dr. Deborah Willis’ internationally acclaimed, ‘Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present’, one of the eleven original images is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Art Houston.
An autodidactic visual artist Carl’s photographic career began in 1979 capturing light-oriented imagery on still film, 6 by 8 foot moving molten glass and 1980 20×40 foot dynamic laser illusions, Lumière Captureé. His creative practice spans the gamut of the Art and Design disciplines and bridges the traditional and post-modern worlds of technologies traversing the boundaries of materials and processes. The work belongs to the lineage that sees photography, not as documentation, but as revelation, a continuation of what scientific modernists like Edgerton, Moholy-Nagy, Albers, Arnheim, and Kandinsky each sought in their own ways, the geometry of intuition plus cognition, perception.
Selected for the 25th anniversary edition of Dr. Deborah Willis’ publication, ‘Reflections in Black: A Reframing’, is one of Carl’s new ‘iterations’. This Facet utilizes Lewis’ digital marquetry and combines elements of the Lumière Captureé, 20×40 foot laser images ‘captured’ with an analogue camera and slow film in 1980, with a ‘MugFiles’, photographic ‘iTrait’ of Wailers’ guitarist, Owen ‘Dreddie’ Reid. Images from the Lumière Captureé Facet Amon Carter Museum and Schomburg Collection, with a photograph of Anthony Davis from the MugFiles in the Anacostia Museum.
“I was recently queried by a new, young collector where I thought I fit in the History of Photography. My feeling is that I stand, in the medium of Photography, the way a prism stands in a beam of light, not at the beginning or the end, but at the point of refraction.”, states Carl, “My sense of curiosity and experimentation has yet to change, now I’m focused on the ‘captured’ 20×40 foot laser illusions and combining it with the latest immersive technologies, reimagining ideas I’ve had from 3 decades ago.“
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